Comparison of explicitly simulated and downscaled tropical cyclone activity in a high-resolution global climate model
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Author(s)
Emanuel, Kerry Andrew
Oouchi, Kazuyoshi
Satoh, Masaki
Yamada, Yohei
Date Issued
October 2010
Journal
Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
Citation
Emanuel, Kerry, Oouchi, Kazuyoshi, Satoh, Masaki, Tomita, Hirofumi, AND Yamada, Yohei. "Comparison of Explicitly Simulated and Downscaled Tropical Cyclone Activity in a High-Resolution Global Climate Model" Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems [Online] Volume 2 Number 9 (11 October 2010)©2010 American Geophysical Union
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The response of tropical cyclone activity to climate change is a matter of great inherent interest and practical importance. Most current global climate models are not, however, capable of adequately resolving tropical cyclones; this has led to the development of downscaling techniques designed to infer tropical cyclone activity from the large-scale fields produced by climate models. Here we compare the statistics of tropical cyclones simulated explicitly in a very high resolution (~14 km grid mesh) global climate model to the results of one such downscaling technique driven by the same global model. This is done for a simulation of the current climate and also for a simulation of a climate warmed by the addition of carbon dioxide. The explicitly simulated and downscaled storms are similarly distributed in space, but the intensity distribution of the downscaled events has a somewhat longer high-intensity tail, owing to the higher resolution of the downscaling model. Both explicitly simulated and downscaled events show large increases in the frequency of events at the high-intensity ends of their respective intensity distributions, but the downscaled storms also show increases in low-intensity events, whereas the explicitly simulated weaker events decline in number. On the regional scale, there are large differences in the responses of the explicitly simulated and downscaled events to global warming. In particular, the power dissipation of downscaled events shows a 175% increase in the Atlantic, while the power dissipation of explicitly simulated events declines there.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3894/JAMES.2010.2.9
